Arkansas Online

Safe trips touted by provider of trucks

3,103 driverless miles completed

NOEL OMAN

The driverless truck delivery company that Walmart Inc. works with in Bentonville has successfully completed 437 trips covering 3,103 miles without a driver behind the wheel, an executive for the the company said Tuesday.

Gatik has been operating the autonomous system without a driver since August.

The company’s trucks have been plying a 7.1-mile round trip between a “dark” Walmart that is used to assemble customer orders and a Neighborhood Market store, where customers pick up their orders, since June 2019.

Before August, safety drivers were behind the wheel but didn’t operate the vehicles.

Since the program’s inception, the trucks have amassed 129,628 miles on the route, or more than 18,000 round trips, and fulfilled 33,000 customer orders, said Richard Steiner, the head of policy and communications for Gatik.

The trucks have making several trips per day, working up to 12 hour per day, seven days a week, he said. “We know this route more intimately than anyone else on the planet.”

Steiner’s comments came in a presentation to the Arkansas Highway Commission, which has been the agency given oversight of the program — by two state laws passed in 2019 and 2021 — that allows autonomous vehicles to operate in Arkansas.

Last December the Arkansas Highway Commission gave approval for Gatik and Walmart to use the box trucks without a safety driver, which the companies said made Gatik the first autonomous trucking company allowed to remove the safety driver from a commercial delivery middle-mile route “anywhere in the world,” the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette previously reported.

Middle mile refers to the part of the supply chain in which items are transported between warehouses or from warehouses to stores. In comparison, last-mile deliveries are made from stores or fulfillment centers directly to customers’ homes.

Gatik also is working with Walmart on a longer route — 20 miles — in Metairie, La., a suburb of New Orleans.

The projects are among several that Walmart is evaluating as it seeks to use the autonomous electric trucks to develop what one senior store executive called an “efficient, safe and sustainable solution for transporting goods on repeatable routes between our stores.”

The project in Bentonville is no longer a demonstration, Steiner said. The route is producing revenue for his company.

“The reason why this is so relevant today … everybody wants their goods [now]. No one is going to wait three or five days. Everyone wants it in a one or two-hour delivery window.

“We’re actually looking to scale that at a significant level.”

The trucks are outfitted with a suite of high-tech sensors that allow them to “see” 300 yards in a 360-degree arc around the truck. Each of the trucks’ systems, including braking and steering, have redundancies that reduce the chance of failure, Steiner said.

Even without the safety drivers, an employee monitors the trucks during their trips. No human intervention has been needed throughout the life of the program, Steiner said.

Business & Farm

en-us

2021-12-08T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-08T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/283077007542339

WEHCO Media